Overlord Again
by joanhello
Summary: Takes place in the far future in a world where vampires, lycanthropes and other things that go bump in the night co-exist with aliens and supers. There's a zombie apocalypse as backstory.


Of all the casualties of the zombie uprising, the one most widely mourned is human self-government. The only cities on the continent that are human-ruled anymore are the ones with a high proportion of magical practitioners. Voudounistes rule New Orleans, santeros Miami, and Boston, once famous for its witch trials, is ruled by witches. Several cities are now controlled by their vampire populations, or by vampire-lycanthrope alliances. The Pacific Northwest is mainly fae ruled. Cities with superheroes or mutant colonies universally fared better than cities without. Even some supervillians came to the fore, preferring to switch sides and defend their cities rather than see them reduced to ghost towns. And that is what happened to those cities with no superhuman or magically skilled protectors of any sort: they stand empty. They may not have population for a century.

In Metro City, fifty years after he gave up the title, Megamind is Overlord again. Not that he wanted the job. Having saved the city, he would have happily handed it back to the elected government. The problem was that none of the other regional rulers would talk to human politicians, no matter how many votes they got. So here he is at dawn, holding his enormous forehead and bitching about vampires and their archaic, punctilious rules of etiquette. On another morning it might have been about the scatterbrained fae or the interminable rum-soaked ceremony he's got to go through to talk to one of the loa. At the moment it's vampires because Metro City is part of a coalition that's trying to revive shipping between Lake Superior and the other Great Lakes, which requires restoring the locks at the little vampire-controlled city of Sault Sainte Marie. He could send people with engineering ability, some of whom breath fresh water and could go down for a close look, and bots with heavy hauling capacity. The restoration of the locks to working condition would be simple enough. What isn't simple is the negotiations. The Master Vampire of Sault Sainte Marie is over three hundred years old. Presumably she didn't get to be that old, never mind preserving her city through the uprising, without a certain amount of sheer practicality in her character. Why, then, does she not see the obvious advantages of the Soo Locks, as they are known in the region, being restored to their intended use?

She must want something more. Something that she doesn't think she can get by just asking for it. Megamind has enough trouble understanding live humans; undead ones are completely beyond him. He misses Roxanne. She died three years ago. Her body was cremated, as all bodies are now, and the ashes were scattered over the lake. She had been better at communication and information than anyone else available to him. She would have known what to do.

His audience for these complaints is, as ever, Minion. The fish's growth slowed down after the first twenty years of his life, but it never completely stopped. Longer now than Megamind's arm, he has long since outgrown the famous gorilla suit (which is in the museum). These days his suits tend to be four- or eight-legged, or equipped with antigravity, and he tends not to wear them at home. Instead, as soon as he comes in, he tips himself out into the vast aquarium that takes up a quarter of the living space. Part of one of its glass walls looks out into the dining room. The table is set up against it so that the fish can float at a comfortable conversational distance from the air-breathers in the house while they eat. Needless to say, Minion no longer makes his boss' breakfast. Instead, the kitchen itself has been made semi-sentient. It does the cooking and a recent generation of brainbot, equipped with elegant, fully functional mechanical hands, does the serving. What Minion still does is the advising. For all that he doesn't actually have feet, he is much more likely to have both feet on the ground, so to speak, than Megamind is.

"Sir, this is where you always bog down. Your train of thought leads to Roxanne and then it stops. Okay, you can't talk to Roxanne. Do the next best thing. Talk to Lisa." The eldest of Megamind's and Roxanne's children, Lisa is the only one who is fully human. She lives in one of the new floating suburbs with her children and their fish companions, all Minion's clones and grandclones.

"If she'll speak to me."

"Only one way to find out, sir." Minion knows she will; he and his clone, Lalli, who is Lisa's fish companion, have been in touch. But the boss needs to do the work himself.

Megamind sighs heavily and gets out his phone. "Record message: Forgive Me. End message. Send to Lisa as text." He puts the device away. "I hope that works." He resumes eating. Three bites later, it buzzes in his pocket. He swallows and puts it to his ear.

"Ollo, Lisa."

"Honestly, Daddy, there's nothing to forgive. So you've got a girlfriend. So she's half my age and a quarter yours. It's your life. I don't have to like it. Now what's up?"

He explained about the vampires, the locks, the stalled negotiations

"Have you asked for help from the vampire community here?"

"There isn't one and you know why."

"Oh, no! Okay, I see the problem. The vampires who were here at the uprising crapped out on us, so you haven't let a vampire move here since? The Master of the Soo probably thinks you're just prejudiced against vampires. She doesn't want to deal with you at all, but because of the rules of vampire etiquette, she can't come right out and say that. So she's stalling you, hoping you'll get frustrated and go away."

"She has very nearly got her wish." The truth was that he did have a kind of prejudice against vampires. He was the least magically susceptible person on Earth. He couldn't see magically produced illusions of any kind, so he saw vampires as they really were. To him, they looked a little too much like zombies for comfort. Nevertheless, because of his early experiences with people treating him badly because of the way he looked, he worked to conceal his dislike. Apparently he hadn't worked hard enough. "All right, what's the best way to straighten this out?"

"Write her a letter. Tell her you're open to re-establishing a vampire community here, NOT with the vampires that abandoned the city in its hour of need, but with others that maybe have some backbone. In fact, let her pick 'em, or at least pick the leadership. They'll be her spies but, hey, she's gonna be your ally, right? You should be glad she'll be kept informed about the situation on the ground here. Even better, request that one of them be willing to be in the Night Patrol. It's a gesture of trust and at the same time it'll get the rest of your proteges used to vampires, you know, by sparring with that one during training and stuff, so when some vampire causes trouble, they'll be ready."

"I like it. Anything else you care to suggest?"

"Throw in some fancy language. I don't have to tell you about that. Print the letter on actual paper and have Michael and Dale hand-deliver it by jetboat." Michael Ritchie was Lisa's brother, cloned by Megamind from his own DNA, and his designated successor as Overlord. Dale was Michael's fish companion.

"Why Michael and Dale?"

"It's how vampires think. Family is everything. If you send members of the family, they'll know you mean it. It should be a pair that's in the Patrol and has some diplomatic skills. That narrows it down to just Michael and Dale. They should each take a side-arm and three brainbots."

"A well-armed entourage, not a war party."

"Exactly. And, Daddy, talk to Michael and Dale before you write the letter. Give them time to make arrangements."

"Oh, Lisa, it's so unfair that you can't run this city and let me spend my days playing laser tag over the lake and throwing would-be heroes into cardboard walls."

She laughed at that. "It may be unfair, but you won't find me complaining. I like having a life."

"Yes, well, thank you for taking time out of it to solve my little problem. Bring the mob to dinner on Thursday?"

"Let me get back to you on that. It may have to be next week."

"Just so it's soon."

"Love you, Daddy."

"Love you, Lisa." He pockets the phone with a silly smile. "Oh, Minion, she doesn't hate me."

"Great. What did she say about the Soo?"

Megamind described the entire plan.

"You know," Minion reacted. "I'd never think of that, and then once I hear it, it seems obvious."

"Smartest person I know," replied Megamind.


End file.
